Water has become a scarcer commodity throughout the world and even in the Western United States, conservation wars are being waged one battle at a time, with restricted-flow shower heads for residential use, tamper-proof in-line flow restrictors for hotels and apartments, volume occupying blocks for toilet tanks, and so forth. Small amounts of water saved, multiplied by millions of consumers adds up to enough water in many places to turn a shortage into an adequate supply.
One of the greatest culprits for wasting water is the toilet. Of the water consumed in a typical house, toilet leakage will account for between 5% and 13%, depending on how conservation-conscious the residents are, according to a HUD study conducted in 1984 by Brown and Coldwell. A toilet may leak at the flapper valve which separates the toilet tank from the toilet, or the float-regulated fill value. Depending on the nature of the leak, it is very likely to be silent and invisible. A typical toilet has a multiplicity of flush water holes just beneath the rim, and the slow, or not-so-slow, draining of leaked water down the porcelain bowl of the toilet will not be detected in the ordinary course of toilet use. Even on close inspection slow leaks may not be observable. Unfortunately, they are observable on the water bill and show up dramatically in the accumulative water loss of an entire population. A slow leak running 24 hours a day, seven days a week multiplied times millions is a lot of water.
Except in the unlikely event that water is dripping onto the floor through the toilet tank, if a toilet is leaking, the flush water must run through the manifold and exit through the flush holes and the trap, as there is no other path for the water to take. Therefore, traditionally the manner of checking for leaks in a toilet involved putting a tablet of soluble blue dye in the toilet tank and waiting for blue streaks to show up in the bowl. This technique however suffers from the drawbacks of the relatively long time period the test requires, and results that may be erratic. It may take 10 to 20 minutes for the dye to dissolve adequately to run an accurate test. This by itself renders the test subject to inaccuracy, inasmuch as an impatient Householder could well walk away prematurely believing there was no leakage.
Additionally, if the toilet or bowl has been using the cosmetic, sanitizing or disinfectant blue (or other color) dye that is popular in some circles, it is not possible tell if the blue dye of the tablet is coming through or not. It is necessary to actually drain the toilet tank, remove the coloring agent, flush the bowl once or twice with clear water and then put in the dye tablet. Even then, the blue dye from the tablet becomes so diluted because of its small volume compared to the voluminous water supply in the toilet tank that a small leak may not be detected. And in a large hotel setting, for example, it can be imagined how this technique would not be very popular amongst maintenance personal, who want to be able to go in, check for a leak quickly, fix it if exists, and move on the next installation. Return trip sequencing and delays are only frustrating to overworked maintenance staffers.
The commercially popular toilets that have no tank but rather use a high-flow-rate xe2x80x9cflushometerxe2x80x9d valve, generally known by the name of the most prevalent manufacturer as the xe2x80x9cSloan(trademark) valvexe2x80x9d, also leak, as the gaskets deteriorate, and should be replaced. Since there is no tank to put the blue dye into, there is currently no way at all to check these installations for leaks. Therefore, they will leak more and more until they finally make enough noise to attract a maintenance man""s attention.
Considering the enormous amount of water that is lost through toilet leakage as can be seen from the charts in the accompanying drawings, it is of significant importance to have a inexpensive, quick, accurate and sensitive test for leakage for toilets primarily, but also for urinals, bidets and any other kind of fixture which rinses a porcelain surface area through small overlying holes, laying the foundation for invisible and silent leakage to begin as valve seats and valves wear, warp, or stiffen with age.
The instant invention fulfills all of these criteria for quick, inexpensive, accurate, and very sensitive tests for leaking toilets. It is the reverse of the dye table technique, in which the observer watches for blue (or other colored) streaks to appear on the white porcelain background of the toilet bowl. According to the instant technique, the observer squirts or otherwise applies a swath of dense, thick dye liquid just under the flush holes and watches for white lines to appear as the clear water drains from the holes and carries the dye with it just beneath the hole area leaving vertical columns of white on a back ground of deep blue, for example. With the right kind of dye liquid, the blue swath is very dense optically, yet the dye is highly soluble so that the rivulets of water almost instantly become-visible as little white stalactite-looking erosion lines begin appearing in the dye swath.
So fast is this technique that even a minute leak will become visible within five seconds in most cases, or ten seconds in the worst case scenario. This enables a single worker to test a hundred toilets or more in a day, compared to perhaps twenty using the old dye tablet technique. A squirt of dye with a single swipe of the hand, waiting only a moment to check for the white columns, brings the entire test from start to finish down to a time of ten seconds or less. One metropolitan water district study concluded that in a comprehensive survey of residential leaks, the test would save 19 minutes per toilet over conventional testing methods. The cost of labor that would be saved in such a survey would be huge.
And there are no trade-offs at all, as the material that is used is biodegradable, inexpensive, and will not permanently stain carpets or clothing. In addition to saving materials costs and the time of the worker, a real advantage lies in the much higher likelihood that the tests will actually be performed, and, that minor leaks which would otherwise go unobserved, will be detected. A tedious test, or one that requires return visits, or waiting for a period of minutes, is a frequently skipped test, especially since immediate catastrophic consequences do not flow from an uncorrected slow leak. But testing ignored for a period of years results in an enormous water loss that can now be curbed with a simple test that no one would feel compelled to dodge.